From the Washington Post:
The Supreme Court decided yesterday that public employees may not bring their discrimination complaints to federal court when they are alleging that adverse job actions resulted from arbitrary or malicious reasons unique to their situation.
"Such a 'class of one' theory of equal protection has no place in the public employment context," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in a 6 to 3 decision involving Anup Engquist, an Oregon public employee whose job was eliminated after what she said were repeated problems with her boss.
"Public employees typically have a variety of protections from just the sort of personnel actions about which Engquist complains," Roberts wrote, "but the Equal Protection Clause is not one of them."
This seemingly makes discrimination against a single person OK, as long as it has nothing to do with their race, gender or national origin. The Post points out that this is a different decision than it had made in a case involving a landowner who claimed arbitrary treatment by city officials.Roberts acknowledged that the court had decided in a 2000 case that an individual property owner had the right to sue the government over arbitrary treatment by city officials. But there is a difference between government's legislative and regulatory actions and its employment practices, Roberts said.
Employment decisions "are quite often subjective and individualized, resting on a wide array of factors that are difficult to articulate and quantify," Roberts wrote.
"The practical problem with allowing class-of-one claims to go forward in this context is not that it will be too easy for plaintiffs to prevail, but that governments will be forced to defend a multitude of such claims in the first place, and courts will be obliged to sort through them in a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack," he said.
The dissenters, well, dissent.
Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissent joined by Justices David H. Souter and Ginsburg, said that the hypothetical needle is clearly identified in Engquist's complaint and that it should not be necessary to prohibit all such suits in order for the courts to decide which ones have merit.
"Even if some surgery were truly necessary to prevent government from being forced to defend a multitude of equal protection 'class of one' claims," Stevens wrote, "the Court should use a scalpel rather than a meat-axe."
In class we covered the idea that a republican system of government, with rules determining how citizens were to be treated, was intended to avoid the arbitrary and capricious treatment common in autocracies.
Perhaps I was wrong.
